My wife and I often sit and talk about how lucky we are and how much we are enjoying life after "work". I retired from a regular job 15 years ao at age 58 - just got tired of all the corp BS and called it quits. My wife kept her job and will retire sometime this year after 35 years of service to her job. Looking back we didn't have financial planners, stock market experts to guide us, or bankers to overlook our finances. What we did have going for us was a very good set of parents who taught us how to live within our means and to become debt free as soon as possible. We bought our first brand new car this year after buying used cars for decades, we still live in the paid off house that we moved into in 1966. Our credit cards are paid off each month leaving no balances and when eating out we rarely, if ever, go to overpriced places. Our spending habits have always been if you can't pay for it - don't get it. Never in our lives have we felt like we haven't owned anything we wanted and for sure have always been able to have anything we needed. You see, this was the way we were both raised and in looking back we could not be more thankful and grateful.

Today we are able to live a very comfortable life, enjoy our time together, and do things we only dreamed about years ago. All this because we learned very early in our lives how to become, and stay, debt free and forget about how we would be able to pay for things we didn't need, and did not bring us any additional happiness.

I don't know what people do late in life who suddenly wake up and discover they have not put themselves in a position to enjoy their senior years. Today I have many things which keep me busy. I gig several times weekly - mainly to pay for the equipment I want - run my own Real Estate Company which pays for our several overseas trips a year - and basically just enjoy life. The best thing about all this is the fact whatever I do - I do it because I want to and not because it is required of me.

Gary is right on target though. In the world in which we live today you have to take care of yourself and not depend on anything or anyone else to do it for you.

Deane